Devizes in Wiltshire, where one of the treatment centres is located.
Photograph: Stephen Barnes/Alamy

A private healthcare company has sent letters to hundreds of GPs setting out a price list of operations they could offer their patients to beat NHS delays and restrictions.

Care UK, which runs nine centres offering treatment on the NHS, said it intended to use spare theatre time to provide “self pay” procedures ranging from earwax removal to hip replacements.

The company said it was trialling the scheme at two treatment centres in the west of England but insisted core work at the sites would remain NHS referrals.

The move has, however, alarmed some GPs and health campaigners who fear it is another example of creeping privatisation in the NHS.

The procedures are being offered at the Emersons Green treatment centre near Bristol and a second centre in Devizes in Wiltshire. The list of treatments on offer ranges from earwax removal (£160) to hip replacements at just under £9,000. Other procedures being offered include cataract surgery, tonsillectomies and vasectomies.

Mike Campbell of campaign group Protect Our NHS said: “It is totally wrong that hard-pressed GPs are being encouraged to recommend their patients to a private company where patients will be paying when they should be getting their treatments free.

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“More people are having to pay for urgent procedures, either by dipping into savings or by taking out health insurance. For those who can’t pay, waiting lists grow.”

Dr David Porteous, a Bristol GP, argued that it normalised the idea of paying for healthcare. He said: “It’s about removing the expectation of state provision of services.”

A spokesperson said: “We commission Care UK to provide a number of planned care treatments. As a private provider of healthcare, they are able to offer self-pay treatments for patients, completely separate from the NHS. We are keen to stress there will continue to be a clear separation between NHS and private treatments.”

A Care UK spokesperson said it had begun to offer a “self-pay option” at the two treatment centres to give “an additional treatment option for patients who find their access to NHS funded procedures has been restricted or delayed”.

They added: “Our focus will be on making use of otherwise unused theatre time to give easy, affordable access to procedures which have been restricted or de-prioritised by NHS commissioners, but which are nonetheless beneficial to patients’ wellbeing and quality of life.

“This option is essentially the same as that already offered to patients by NHS hospitals and gives an additional high quality, transparent, value-for-money alternative to private health insurance and to the much higher prices charged by existing private hospitals.”

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Care UK said clinicians received no financial incentive to treat self-pay patients and their decisions were based purely on clinical need. In addition, the company followed strict legal guidelines to ensure that the request to explore self-pay is initiated by the patient.

“I would like to stress that Emersons Green and Devizes treatment centres will continue to see NHS-funded patients for the same range of services as we have been doing in recent years,” the spokesperson added.

Care UK has close links with the NHS. It has won contracts worth many hundreds of millions of pounds and provides a range of NHS-funded services for NHS bodies in England. They include NHS 111 telephone advice centres, GP practices, walk-in centres, out-of-hours GP services, diagnostics facilities and treatment centres, and healthcare services in prisons and other secure facilities.

Research by the trade union Unite in 2014 said that Care UK had won contracts worth £650m from the NHS over the previous two years.

The company was involved in a row when it emerged that Caroline Nash, the wife of Care UK chairman John Nash, had in 2009 donated £21,000 to Andrew Lansley, the then Conservative shadow health secretary, at a time when he was drawing up controversial plans toallow more private provision in the NHS, which would later emerge in the health and social care bill 2010.